Concert Review
‘OK Go’ Rocks the 9:30 Club

By K-K Bracken (November 22, 2006)

For those of you that say that rock is dead, I have four letters in response: OK Go.

It is a band made up of four men—Rock Stars—Rock Gods, I found out on Sunday, November 19, when they played at the 9:30 Club in D. C. Lead singer and guitarist Damien Kulash is from the area, and explained to a fanatical crowd that he was being nice to us, because his mom was in the audience.

The 9:30 Club had yet to reach its 1,500-person capacity when opening bands Quit Your Day Job and the French Kicks played. Quit Your Day Job, for lack of a better description, was a Swedish techno-pop band of three men that felt the need to remove an article of clothing every time they finished a song. The lyrics were nonsensical and repetitive, the best songs including “Pissing on a Panda” and “Look! A Dollar,” but they certainly did their job of pumping the audience up for OK Go. The next band, the French Kicks, was a bit of a disappointment. The lead singer seemed to desperately want to be U2’s Bono, and tried his hardest to be so in his manner and vocals. Between clashing instrumentals and impossible-to-understand lyrics, the crowd was antsy in anticipation for the headliners.

Finally, at 10:30, (the show had started two hours previously), after prolonged technical problems, guitarist/keyboardist Andy Ross came onstage to billowing smoke and played a single note on his keyboard. The crowd held its breath as the three other members took up their instruments and played “The House Wins,” the final epic track of their second CD, “Oh No.”

Cheering and singing alternately, the audience around the stage had little room to move except up and down to OK Go’s eclectic, acidic, rocking rock music. Kulash, with a camera on the end of his microphone that projected his sweaty face onto the screen behind the stage, talked to us about touring and his parents. At one point, OK Go threw tambourines into the audiences with stern instructions to not use them as souvenirs, but to shake them vigorously throughout the concert.

After Kulash ran into an ecstatic audience to prove we weren’t piranhas, bassist Tim Nordwind, Kulash and Ross all came into the crowd and played on what can only be described as a pedestal. They handed flashlights to audience members and had them hold them up as they performed acoustic versions of “A Million Ways” and “What To Do.”

Enforcing their theme of audience participation, during “Oh Lately It’s So Quiet,” a love/ghost story, they had us hold up our cell phones, creating a firefly effect as the sold-out crowd swayed in unison.

The encore featured dancing wind tubes and the much-desired dance routine from “A Million Ways,” made famous as one of the most-played clips ever on YouTube.com.

OK Go rocked the 9:30 Club. There is simply no other way to put it.